


Other Brothers

by homo_pink



Series: masquerade fills [5]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Coming of Age, First Love, M/M, POV Outsider, Weecest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-21
Updated: 2020-04-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 19:01:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,984
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23762002
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/homo_pink/pseuds/homo_pink
Summary: A callow boy can go from infancy to someone’s lover in the space of two wildflower summers.written for the spn_masquerade prompt:Really would love an outsider POV of someone meeting one of the boys separately and then seeing them together and realizing that — no matter how charming (Dean) or quiet (Sam) they are on their own — they are a force of nature together.
Relationships: Dean Winchester/Sam Winchester
Series: masquerade fills [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1152704
Comments: 41
Kudos: 361
Collections: SPN_Masquerade Spring 2020





	Other Brothers

**Author's Note:**

> unspecified underage ages, at least for sam. dean might be an adult. maybe. it's only very blurrily mentioned.

First love can be so nauseating. 

She’s seen it before, here and there. Even stepped in it a time or two herself. 

Can make a sucker out of a scholar in a squint, that’s for sure. ‘A fool’s malaria.’ And wasn’t her momma right on the money about that one? Three ex-husbands plus one sitting dirty in the grave are Midge’s cold, creased proof of it.

Not that the kid that’s just come brambling in looking somewhere between 18 and 18-to-life is any sort of academic, to be sure. She’d bet her one good non-arthritic foot on it. Boys who look like his kind are hell on the heart but they never do have much sense for long division. 

Leather and lies, she thinks, wondering how much lipstick that collar has seen.

The little Cum-Quick shop she runs is hidden behind the truck stop’s fuel pumps off US 441 and it’s browsable at such a bacon ‘n eggs hour. Has to be now, she figures, if he wants to sneak between a militant father and a snoopy, tattle-tale kiddie brother. 

Yeah, she’s seen ‘em. Whole town probably has by now; they’ve got drifter, grifter, and child protective services written all over each of them, and this isn’t even Midge’s first glimpse of the antihero trio. Maybe last year, year before. Spotty recollection of wheres and whens but Midge Orlosky is a database for faces. This little setup here, though, ho’ boy—absinthe across the eyes and summer’s touch dotted all along a barfighter’s nose, a heavied bottom lip just waiting for the next bummed smoke to grace it—damn near no one’s gonna be forgetting this young mister.

To be some shiny new sweet sixteen thing again, she thinks, where a visit to the corner coat hanger clinic could’ve been in her future had time dealt her a different hand. 

Nope. No good ever comes with good-looking that’s this outright.

Only one other patron in the place currently, cane walking into one of the viewing rooms lining the back wall, finicky neon sign over the booth door taking its time to glow over to IN USE after he pulls the handle shut behind him. Grandpa Gloryhole doesn’t care to see what business the peach fuzz that just walked in is here on. 

“Help you find something?” she asks, a little louder than she usually might, just to see if young and dumb’s got roach mentality, if he’ll scatter to the shadows or not.

“Nah. I’m just gonna look. Around. See what you got in here,” but he puts a grin all through it, hooked up at the end of his winsome mouth. 

Polite but something else, too. His voice spins her head in place a little, not what she was expecting to come out of there by half—smooth as new kerosene and low to the ground, a sound like he hasn’t been a boy in dog years. 

“Well,” she says, collecting her wits back into her wig, “today’s deal is two tapes for ten bucks, six-fifty if renting. Plus the french ticklers in back are red tag clearance. Here if ya need me. Just say so.”

She comes down the short steps off the elevated see-all counter, a stack of centerfold mags hugged up in her arms, her ortho shoes that he boredly takes in, looks away from, same way she knows he got an eyeful of the block-lettered headline reading _Ten Full Color Pages of Tight Teen Pussy_ smashed against her lump sum double Ds.

She could card him if she felt like but the place could use a sale or two, ain’t a mob of wallets this early. Never is. Besides, her bones are just curling with curiosity now. Interested in her new subject, if he’s a rubber cunt sleeve or a knobby prod up the ass kind of fellow. It might even be his first time in a purebred porn shop.

“Thanks,” he says, and winks. A full old school loverboy thing that carries a chorus of background swooners. Oh for certain this one is trouble in a double wide. “I’ll holler.”

When he turns away, the laid open stretch of his bare neck is sunlessly pale in the overhead store lights. She can’t be so sure if that glaring cherryblack wallop sitting to the side of his throat is from a hard fight or an easy fuck, though.

She does find it in her to get back to what she was meant to be doing eventually, restocking the racks with current issues of the boob bible and dusting away long dead DNA of a hundred mucky truckers but she’s surely watching him, too, him and his felony fingers.

Midge catches the part of the story that the buggy surveillance cameras won’t.

The peek in at a few particulars on his browsing stroll—jelly dildos, the locked case of low grade medical instruments, how he moves on a deer mouse’s feet to explore the menu at the mini bottles of flavored lubes, wants to pick up the Wild Apple and finally does, only to thumb at it and think on it and then put it back down, delicately, the way he completely forgoes the uncensored softcore that the magazine stands offer, uniquely uninterested over it, like he knows he’s got tight teen pussy waiting for him around the bend anyway.

No, she really doesn’t reckon his dick goes lonely for very long.

Still and all, there’s something about Mr. Sweetheart that looks, if you’re looking, just a little unlucky. 

Settled slump of his strong shoulders, maybe. How he keeps noodling with the little black beeper on his hip, looking hopeful at it, looking hopeless at it, rehooking it on his belt loop, repeated regular. She hasn’t heard it make noise all this time. Maybe that’s it. Maybe junior’s nursing a broken blue heart, been kissed and dissed, a taste of his own thick medicine. Men are always doling out the hurts. 

Hooey, her thoughts. The boy’s just making her dream again.

Well. There’s an _other_ about him in there somewhere, whatever it is, she can tell. She just can’t determine. 

Probably why not ten minutes gone by and she finds he’s got on a face full of what might just be scattered uncertainty, Midge feels a little sweet on the poor dear. Just a little. She reassesses the fit of her idea of him.

“Lemme help your pickle,” she says, her voice carrying over the dim shoo-bop oldies station she likes to keep the radio set to. Amor’s atmosphere is important.

She finishes up what she’s doing, neatening the lineup of pheromone perfumes, and heads over to the dump bin of panties he’s waffling at, where he’s holding in one band-aided fist some velvetty pink number and in the other, a T-back string white pair that’s got a big red trampy kiss print sitting on the front like an instruction. 

His eyes gain a little more color when he’s nervous, she guesses. They’re huge and unrelentingly green right now, looking at her when she says, “This a special occasioner or a just because?” 

“I—what,” his voice struggles, unsure.

She crowns her glasses up onto her head and takes the prom queenie pink bit he’s been clutching onto from him, holds it up before them both; cute, skinny small. Course that would be his type. It’s her imagination gone back to its trickeries, has to be, when she thinks for a second, just that firstborn second when she puts the scrap of fabric plain on display, that she can hear the rushing, gushing pound of his heart spike up.

She asks, “You’re looking to come away with something cute for someone cute? No?” Yes. His freckles, nearly one by one, are firing up red hot but he nods. Damn precious thing. 

“Well. Is this little gift for no reason or is it the for-a-reason sort? Birthday? Anniversary? Anni-pervsary?” Folks love celebrating their first fiddle diddle.

“No,” he chokes out. “No—not. I just want to, I wanna get. Something?”

“All ya had to say.” He’s as thrown by her devil’s wink as she was by his. “You’re looking an old pro in the eye, alright? This is my cake. And I bet we can get you sorted and sold in under five. I’ll poke, you squeal. Wanna?” 

His skin’s all full of fever gotta be halfway down his neck, rims of his ears rung with it, sticking them out even more sorely, the guy’s ready to shoot out of here at first spook but—“Yes. That would be, yeah,” he says, boldening himself up a little better—he’s game, soldiering on as soldiers do.

She’ll be fast. She’s good at this. They didn’t call her Under a Minute Midge on the second floor bathroom wall at Fred T. Foard High School for nothing.

“What color palette we working with here, let’s start there. Is little lady like you? Victorian complexion all sweet like?” Another punch of color works over his cheeks at this but this time he big-boys past it quick, shakes his head, sure. “Mm, mm. So summertime legs yearround then?”

Throws her a strict nod. Clears his throat in a way that sounds all of a softened hiccup. And nods again, like bleeding ink punctuation.

“Lotta curve or a little?” She’s looking at the legholes on both of his choices, the lacy elastic edges, the finer rosy ribbing. 

“No.” He looks to the legholes, too, and stumbles through saying, “Um, none, I mean. None.”

An even bittier body than she was expecting, okay, either of these will likely suit. She taps the tip of her tongue to the backs of her teeth, letting the picture begin to de-cloud itself. “So. Tan, teeny, and...tight, if I’m guessing correct?” 

A smug something comes through the shine of his eye.

If only Midge had a little more time to wheedle and dig here, she could really work a wonder—set green romeo up with a winning ticket and send him off into the wet in-between of some little gal’s legs with a complimentary bundling of babydoll, thong, and matching fluff-trim peignoir to hit just below the buttcheeks. Powder blue performs well against a suntan. But no, no, it’s really best to keep with one’s own choosings. 

“Next bullet. Scope of intimacy,” she says loosely, not missing the rub and swish of his thumbnail back and forth on the little white whore ones he’s still got a leash on, and, looser, when he looks at her like she’s socked him in the rooster eggs, “how well do you know your someone?”

He laughs. “What.”

“Her moods. Her maybe reactions,” she says, not at all denying herself the delight of getting to watch a visible think happen on his face, guileless. “How—”

“Well.” His boot soles shift against the texture tile flooring. “Very—well.”

“Ah. Like a steak then. No blood.” 

He laughs again, only not really. It isn’t real. It’s a ha-ha jointed laugh and his eyes kind of muzz, too much like the drunkards that come through often, a shimmery pearl of sweat running through the blonde honey of his eyebrow. 

Scooting past his strangeness she asks, “So what message are we sending her? She’s your baby, she used to be your baby, or you’re hoping she’ll be your baby?”

He comes back on as a fickle television set love-tapped back into focus. 

“Oh, all.”

She looks at him, thorough and thoughtful but not longer than three. Says, “And you’ve rolled around in her bed before?” 

There’s this unconscious thing that men do when they’ve got the sucker’s sickness and well before they’re even aware that they’re symptomatic, that they’re showing their ill to any old Bob or Tom, or Midge. It’s a tongue stumbling thing, a little braggy, an over willingness to prove—a lot of talking with their underpants down around their ankles and not even feeling a breeze. 

It’s: “yes, I—yeah, a bunch. What are you asking, if I know how to fuck—her? Or if I’ve ever? If I’ve. I think I like the white.” It’s: looking down at the bunched fabric, bunching it tighter, a marital color but profane with the pretty red pucker. It’s: swallowing so visibly, and so audibly, and so clearly thinking about somebody’s body wearing it. “It’ll look really. Good.”

It’s saying ‘god’ to yourself in the tenderest little tone when you think the old shoplady helping you hasn’t got the ears of a lively house cat.

This boy is in love in an awful way.

At the counter, she bags up his only lonely item in one of the serial killer suitcases—the miniature Heftys, handy for the hiding and disposing of people parts, secret black plastic—and tosses in a promo lollipop leftover from Valentine’s to add a little oomph to his wooing. It says the shop name on the back of the wrapper but it’s got **KISS ME** in raised white letters printed on front of the candy itself. 

Not a gussied up box of Godiva truffles and Victoria’s Secret stripes, no, but she doubts it’ll take much to get his size-zero missus onto her back with her toes pointed in the air. Girl’s got herself a looker like no one else. And one who is pussywhipped and lashed all to death for her. 

He flusters up again when she adds a second thought freebie condom to his take-homes. 

“$8.24,” she says, so he pays his debt in six greasy green bills and a lot of coins that he counts in the small out loud beneath his breath.

“Gonna be real cute on your babe,” she smooches at him, jamming the register shut. “Off, too.” The frequent shopper punch card she hands him gets four heart-shaped holes in it. 

“Thank you,” he says, eye contact disappeared from their exchange at the end here but the sincerity sits solid in the syllables. Up in the speakers, the Ronettes are sob-singing about being too young to go steady, _don’t they believe it that I love you already_? 

He throws his gear back into neutral when he says “Catch ya later,” and it has her, the spectator, perversely considering the way he must crush a whole lot of rosebudded teenage dreams with that brand of goodbye—not mean in shape but maybe a little unconsciously cruel, the kind of callosity that leaves casualties. Aloof, absorbed in another.

He goes on his way and Midge gets back to her work, displaying the new shipment of cockrings in a pleasing rainbow order, humming heartache along to the song when it asks, 

“Why don’t they let us fall in love?”

~

True love is meatier than the puppy stuff.

It’s less ornamented, less stuttering, and about a good hundred times more potent than the check yes or no affairs. Less careful, too. That nonsense does to a ticker what the voddy does to a strong red liver, and some men are 190 proof.

She gets to thinking about these things now and then, mostly in the evenings, mostly on Sundays. The Sabbath carries a certain charge to it that seems universal. Emptier, slowed down, just too many void minutes to do not a thing but contemplate fallen petals of ones-that-got-away. Midge loved in multiples. Midge was a fucking dish. 

She prefers, now, to distance herself from any such sentimentals. A pack of triple A batteries and a good Danielle Steel are more than enough to fill her dance card.

Inside the only little used bookstore for four towns, she usually heads right for the New-In table. Today there’s a scraggy boy there, crouched over reading a dust jacket.

He isn’t posing any sort of real obstruction or bottlenecking, but he does seem to be taking up an unintentionally lot of space despite being nothing but stretched out skin and having the rib cage of a mourning dove, the nocks of his spine like a long pearl necklace hanging undone underneath his shitty t-shirt. 

And it is shitty. Worn down to the hem and holes, stray threads trailing, she can almost catch the whiff of stink from where she’s stood a couple feet away, and his shoes are the happy kind she remembers from adolescence, same thing the lunchbox kids wore when she was a girl, classic black high top chucks only his are minus the stars on the sides; probably knockoffs. They look just as befallen as the boy, too.

He’s a contrast to the cadence in the place. To the twinkle chime ballerina box medleys strumming softly throughout, soothing and still. He isn’t loud but he looks it. He also looks like loud is something he doesn’t want to be. 

“Read it a couple of weeks ago,” Midge says quiet, heading past the tiny table he’s at to get to the paranormal romance nook at the back of the store. “All blather and chuff. Although there is a memorable scene with a well-to-do cannibal dining at a classy bistro, if you’re into that.” 

He doesn’t respond. His stare is response plenty, sideways but unstartled, as though there very well may be little eyeballs scotch-taped beneath the shag of hair at the back of his head. He eyes the paperback against this new weight, the hot-pink of his top lip going between his teeth, and nods cordial. Bookworm communication.

She leaves the kid be, letting him scrounge up his own judgements, and goes zig-zagging past the reading alcoves and the comfy cushioned rocking chairs.

Ensconced in her own sector of the stacks, Midge flips through a few pages in a few books from a few swivel racks to see if anything grabs out at her. Anguished carpathians in search of human mates, merfolk orgies, a psychic salt-and-peppered mysterioso blowing into a town where the innkeepers’ daughter at the bed and breakfast could face lurid fate should she not go and have her palm read in his quarters, room 999. Nothing but drool. And drool she’s already read. 

Nothing, anyway, to detract the grandmothering gaze she gives when the boy from the table makes his way across the aisles, further into the store, into the shelves.

He’s deep inside the medical science section before she notices that’s what it is. 

That’s—of interest.

An oddball feeling that’s not simply her gerd churns within her tummy. She’d go look-see but she’s not that much of a peeper. 

She doesn’t need to be when he reemerges soon after, when she’s still standing stuck to the spot holding a novella with a wolf-woman splashed crass across the cover, and goes hiding into a new row— **Spiritualism & Self-Help**—two tall, thin hardbacks tucked under a sharpened elbow. 

The hocus pocus devilry stuff doesn’t take up too much space here. Maybe a board or two, she isn’t sure, she usually hurries by with a mumble and a quip, no slow in her step for that bunkum. More nonsense than her metaphysical penises. 

Her glinty gold tennis bracelet watch gifted from her second sugarpie counts off six minutes against her wrist before the boy ghosts past her again, another volume added to his stash. Should she follow? She should follow. She grew up on murder mystery whodunits. 

A head juts back into her scope while she’s still deliberating, says, a small fall of hair interrupting his eyes,

“Draculas don’t make very good boyfriends.” 

There’s a brief divot in his cheek when he smiles the smallest one her way, before he pops gone like a bubble again, and she laughs, wonderfully, just a little too loud into the respectful low when a faint _unless you’re into that_ follows up, boyhood voice vanishing off. She says, “oh shoot” and means it, covering her titter.

It’s her sign to go see what else is on offer, besides; maybe tucking into the historical Harlequins sounds okay, something with, yes, at least a little more conceivability woven through.

There’s a man parsing through the thick biography titles, crossing things off on a little pocket notepad, and a woman in a purple denim overall dress who’s ducked at the knees in **True Crime**. She’s got a feral blonde bun of hair heaped up top her head, shoved through with yellow wood pencils, and a dangle of earrings that clank as she moves. The sign just beside a Jack the Ripper publication says CHILDREN’S READING CIRCUS 5:30-7:30 PM WEEKLY. SNACKS, STORIES, STUFFED ANIMALS.

And down at the end of the new aisle Midge has chosen—sits the wiry boy.

“Lord,” she says when she sees him see her, a low laugh in her gullet for the way he also puffs out a breath of bemusement.

Never mind that, she decides. Just never mind him. Get your Wuthering whatever and begone, she tells herself chiding. 

She at least gives it her best fighting try.

There are two butterfly wings worth of books surrounding him now, though, fanned out aside and behind, not big, still only using up a tactful amount of room, and all that over there is what keeps snatching her focus. It’s the figures and illustrations, the kooky names on them—current, outdated, one in some entirely other language, a few so crumbling olden they’ve got no name at all that she can see even with her trifocals crowded so far up on her nose her blinks are struggling against the lenses.

Her worn smooth copy of _Venetia_ between her forgotten fingers is old hat, quite literally, compared to this new intrigue she’s found within him: his animal anatomy guides, queer history photo journals, topics on Edwardian occultism.

He’s something of a backwards pickup line—what’s a thing like that doing in a boy like you?

Could be anywhere, really, from a growth spurted twelve to an ill-fed fifteen. Can’t be more though. Can’t.

Doing a second, swift study of him gets her feeling a little grievous again, the way she might to see a puppydog yipping in a yardback, the fleabag, chained outdoors sort worth only a kibble if someone remembers. Because this one here really is the kind of trim that typically comes with a cardboard sign, protrusions poking up every whichways, all knees, wrists, and meatless jaw. 

“Do they make good girlfriends then?” she asks, unable to gag herself back anymore, once she’s seen it.

“Huh?” 

A nearly elegant finger slots into his book as he looks up from his speed skimming.

“The fang people, bloodsuckers,” she says, crooking an accusing pinky at the chunk of his collarbone she’s got her magnified eye on, where the yanked stretch of his shirt slips off it, too boxy big to have been his at first, over-loose, showing a startling patch of flesh with a great, big bite mark sunk in it. The love kind. “Good girlfriends?”

That thing is sordid red and sore looking, little sucks left all around it. Yeah, twelve must’ve been a bad lowball. 

“Oh,” he says, looking where she’s looking, blotting a smile into his nail beds. He rights the fabric. “Shit.”

Somebody out there must think he tastes like spun honey.

It makes some sense that he’s planted down front and center of the section’s sign— **Erotica**. Now, taking him in, that’s just what he looks like. Something already plucked, pitted out.

The steadiness, the surety, an under-skin curl of confidence that only comes through sexpertise, from desperation and spittle and one begging ‘hurry, hurry, hurry,’ while the other puts their ivories into whatever’s closest to muffle—a mouthful of boy who skips meals and studies monstrosities.

It bothers her to think on him this way, an absolute child, so she stops. 

Could just be a little necking, anyhoo. Stripling pecks on the front porch, and all slobber and no know-how in the slimy back seat of somebody’s daddy’s car. She’s tying a ribbon around that thought and keeping it whether it’s true or it isn’t.

“That’s your pick then?” he says, squinching his neck out to check her choice, stare narrowing. Judgily. 

Midge forgot she was holding a thing. She narrows back at him, asks, “regency, really? You’re into the stalwart maidservants and licentious lords? Taffeta ballgowns a-spinning?”

“Not into,” he says, humphed. Corrects, “but have read. And should’ve skipped.”

“For school?” What kind of noontime soap operas are they assigning fresh minds these days?

“Not school,” he laughs.

“Oh-kay, so you’re hoity toity for fun?” Even odder.

He shakes his skull. “I got bored, it was there.” His shoulders tilt up, dumbing down what he’s not-saying. “I have a lot of time. Sometimes.”

She steps over to where he’s at, slacken, cautious—thinking of the dark arts again, then feels a little mean in the soul for it, to be treating him like some coiled snake with its eyes beaded black, no better than the folks forgetting that disappointed doggy. No, this young thing’s a sweetie. 

Possibly a strumpet, but definitely also a sweetie.

“So what’s all this about, then?” she toes at one of the ones he’s got tossed open, a labeled chest cavity diagram on some snouted something or other, a jackal, maybe. “Project you’re working on?”

“I—” he says, a stern thought in his brow bone, “yeah, kind of?” and it takes her getting right up close like this for two things to come to her, overlapping, like a tidy slap across the face, an alert. One, that she was wrong—he actually smells largely pleasant, soapy, a little like the hot sun. Like a man’s aftershave splish splashed. And two, getting a full look at him, a real good front-facing mugshot with a _click!_ and shine and—ah.

It’s the brother.

The brother of the other one, from the other day. With the sooty eyelashes and the million dollar mouth-hole.

Well, shoot. You sure sprouted up, she wants to say, really recognizing him now, from the past, from the last time they rumbled through, the plump of youth still clung to his face, then, and this time she thankfully doesn’t, thankfully keeps her tongue soldered down to the floor of her mouth. 

My, my, my. 

There are definite differences, yeah, now that she’s playing a side by side game to spot them. Like his hair, longer, a lot, lot, longer, a little tumbled; no more the babyish bowl cut style he wore before, giving him that little lamb wimpy image. His button-nose gone tapered out, tipped up above the cut of his mouth, which is wide and wise and—used, she knows now, where it was once covered in kid crumbs. And his hands, large, lean things littered in old cuts. Ain’t a lick about those hands that’s similar. 

He’s nothing but cheekbone and solemnity these days. 

A callow boy can go from infancy to someone’s lover in the space of two wildflower summers, she supposes. 

She slims her book back onto the shelf and turns back to him, says, “Choose me something then.”

“What?” He’d already gone back to his reading, Midge having been silent long enough, both of them studying, separately. 

“To read. You say I have shit taste. Show me yours.” She smiles, so he understands there’s no miff to it.

“What,” he says again, like she can’t be serious. “I didn’t say—”

“Go on.”

“Um,” he says. But his legs do unfold like paperclips. “Okay?”

He is—surprisingly tall once unfurled. Once she can see him easier when he’s not bowed or brushing past or gathering his limbs into a criss-cross on the carpet. When he’s upright and right next to her, he is sure something to look at, and to look up at.

He pauses, brushing floor fibers off his sawn off jean shorts, ripped below the knee knobs, and looking around at the spines surrounding them, head tilt of a pup, she was right. He turns back, considering her. “Anything?” A thought’s come to him, she can see it clear in the tricky stab of his half-smile. 

“Let’s have it,” she nods.

He isn’t gone for so long. 

Staying where she is, she can see him tramp over to **Fiction** , scan around, see him put suction to the inside of his cheek, see how two fingers shift over his lips, press, see her new friend stoop to search and then find, a small debating done before he gouges it out of the shelving. He carries his pick back over, his brows an unreadable arch. 

What he’s brought her isn’t anything larger than she’s used to, or comfortable tackling in a rain against the windows weekend, maybe three or four hundred pages, soft paperback, not too small print. The cover’s blacked out, only a roaming vine spanning across it, a single bloomed red flower pended off the end of it, a cypress or a scarlet trumpet. Possibly.

“Heard of it?”

Midge drags a frosty pink acrylic nail along the name, under the vine, _If There Be Thorns_. No, she shakes her head, she doesn’t think she has. Maybe the author jogs at her, but that’s all.

“What’s it about?” she asks, leafing through a bit, mostly to smell the funk of dated pages, that organic, almost human smell.

“It’s good,” he says, looking down, then sitting down. “It’s part of a—um, set,” he says, starting to huddle his other books together, closing them off, kind of closing himself off, too, “but they didn’t have any others. It should be okay to read on its own.” He stands again, arms full of other worlds, and starts his maze back through the store, kindly rehoming everything back where he found it.

She tags along for a little of it, following the suffocating scent of sadness. It’s a known fault of hers.

“What?” she asks, finding herself in the religious row she likes to keep out of, normally. The day stopped feeling so normal about an hour ago, though. “What is it?” There’s a new pinch in his features, and a friction to how he keeps on tucking a flop of hair back behind his ear, agitated or harmed or—something. Something is there. She doesn’t know what she might’ve said, if it was her. Or if it’s just him.

“I just, gotta—I should go.” Outside, the day is drooping slowly, the sky purpling down. Almost night. 

“Yeah.” He should. She should, too. But, “what’s got your heart in a frown?”

In **Foreign Language Study** , putting two leaflet style books away, he says, “no, nothing. Just thinking.” 

“About who?” 

He looks down at her, a little aback, his eyes combative. “Who says it’s a who?”

The throb in his throat tells her so.

“Your face says it’s a who, you owl,” she says, and that gets him, and he grins a mouth full of little white teeth. “Well, anyway. Whoever’s got your noose all knotted, maybe tell her to ease up on her chawing, you know?” Midge’s stare goes to his clavicle, veiled now but she remembers the view. “Next time she might just eat your heart right out of there.”

“Yeah,” he says, agreeing soft. “I know.”

The sole and singular book she didn’t see him return was the sturdy seafoam blue one, ten dollars, kinked cover starting to tear, and she wonders, as good at keeping secrets as a heart locket, if that blocky bulge in his back pocket is the _Galapagos_ he’d seemed so horribly fond of, on the ground. Sparing the asking of her suspicions, she asks instead,

“Reach me something before you go, will you?” and leads him over to the lusty literary niche, all those bursting bosoms and robust clinchings, the trash tales she’ll indulge in until they ring her death knell. “That milky pink one,” she points up top, an embossed golden rose on the side, her fingertips three inches shy of coming close.

He grabs it real easy on his ladder of legs, no bother to it at all as he hands it over very neighborly, lacking anything struggling about it, just a spend of ten seconds, maybe less.

The dig in her belly is back. 

“What,” he says, funny, when he sees her, what face she must wear. And again “what?”, sharper, some sting to it when she doesn’t answer for so long.

And she doesn’t answer him, never does, never talks to him again in fact, but not because she doesn’t want to, she has a rollout of things on top of her tremoring tongue that she wants to spew, or shriek about, or say sorry for, she’s so sorry, at least—someone ought to be sorry, but she can’t get her mouth to move beyond a vague slump shape, now.

“Okay,” he says, dragged, all weirded out in that way teenagers get. “Well, bye.” A little snot put in it, as in _um, you’re welcome_.

She waits until he’s on the other side of the windowpane, out on the sidewalk and footing his way down the street, safely away from what she’s thinking, what all she’s thinking, to release a whistled breath. 

Because she was wrong. She had to have been so wrong, and lousy for thought, and that white strap that cut unexpectedly across his hip when he reached so high, band of his shorts slinging so low, angel-white material brilliant against the flat of his waist, insane, browned there, browned everywhere as his sorry shirt rose up revealing, that familiar string with the latticing lace of it looking—rude, gorgeous, on such a boy boy, couldn’t have been—could not have been—the grossly sentimental panties she helped his big brother pick out. 

And, she thinks on a steadying sigh, and. Even if it was, even it was—it certainly doesn’t have to mean—that.

Where her first thought flew, sick.

That she’d been talking to Mrs. Sweetheart this whole, whole time. No. She thinks, no.

For all she’s sure, this rascally one could be pulling a cheap prank. Thieving his sibling’s treasure, soiling it, despoiling it before the gentle gift can be given to some girl in this barrened town, some small doll with an olive coloring and tautness through the torso. And wow, that little brother was skinny as a tree branch.

Across the street where she’s back to spying, he pops what might be a sucker into his mouth. Maybe, though, it’s a cigarette? Please. It’s Midge’s last desperate thought. She hopes nicotine on a child. She’s badly certain it’s cherry flavored and sticky rich.

She looks at everything in her swirling peripheral differently, kind of slanted and changed through her center, the fresh-batch table where they met, his silence, the creature feature porny stuff she was after first, his speaking, and the nasty novel in her hands that he chose, playful, his secret. 

Midge searches along the back cover of the thing, only as much as she can, scarcely seeing, thinking hard back to a piece of fiction banned from her teenie school library, gossiped sniggeringly about, squeamish, a buzz of memory almost shocking her glasses off of her as she says, hardly even aloud, reading along,

“—a horror that flowered in an attic long ago, a horror whose thorns are still wet with blood, still tipped with fire.”

~

Paternal love, they say, is hanging your son on the cross.

Maybe that love is twofold, even more grand and giving, when you’ve got a pair of them. Maybe not. Midge doesn’t know how that shit works, she never had any boys. And, waving her embroidered hankie at the barkeep for another sloppy shot of Seagram’s, she’s glad.

It’s luck’s curse that he’s here, too. Over there in that burnout booth with some buddy, bent head, poring over the weekly gazette and pouring a couple of bottles down the choke as he goes, the worst fool of all. Her laugh is a little liquid, and she snorts, settles her tab.

No way does he know. Fully fogged. Fully. Because looking at him, at the drop point knife sheathed on his hip, at the rough beard weeding over his yakker, at the way a fist falls slamming to the table when something is said, or not said, he just looks the type that’d rather buy twin caskets.

The midnight wind is a meek kiss at both of her cheeks as she takes her leave, a clutter of stars out, no noise but diesel trucks passing through on their way to somewhere real. A kick of gravel and a knock noise, fracas of an emptied can making racket in the stilled night, make a liar out of her. Well. Rodents, most like. She grabs at her purse, unzipping quick to find her flashlight and emergency tactical pen should she need them, should it not be rats or rotters. And then a rodent says, strained, 

“Don’t look at me like that. Please.”

Midge, also, doesn’t have to look. At this point she’s just doing it because she wants to. Because she is the betting type and tonight she’s taking it all home. 

In the weak and struggling lamplight haloing over the side of the building, caged in against the barroom brick, leans green romeo’s white juliet—leather jacketed arms bracketing around his head, his chaotic little head. Her reading buddy sighs, fatigued by what sounds like a common argument. He says, “I didn’t even spend any money, okay? I just. I wanted to get you— I thought. Stop fucking staring at me.”

“So you stole it.” The other, the overly pretty one. “Sammy, you know you can’t just—”

“You’ve stolen worse!”

It’s hard to make out much of much, in this dim, already more than she should be seeing as is, their canted profiles, the way they stare all silly and stupid at each other and ached with longing as though they aren’t right there in front of the other, and _Sammy’s_ brother weakens down easy, into a soft-forming smile and he gives—oh, just the sweetest, most revolting little touch to the skin under Sammy’s mouth when he says, “yeah,” in this _tone_. Dreamy. Gone reminiscent. She almost heaves.

Then he says, “so have you,” but—fracturably. Like his voice might shatter if he says more.

She doesn’t know anymore what they’re talking about, doesn’t want to, is ready to just go away from here, back to her little house with its little lemon tree and its little shutters on every window that she can use to block out all the rest of the world. 

She seals her eyes into a squeeze, working well to collect herself and put all of this—those very _other_ brothers—behind her where she’ll never tiptoe back to, never let herself think on, the silky way they smiled in her presence, heads so saturated with the other, helpless and dizzy, and when she opens back up—it’s over. They’re kissing. She’ll always remember, now, how they looked when they were kissing.

A brawler’s hand holding tight and tender to the slenderest neck she’d ever seen, one long leg on the boy that was all legs lifting and wrapping and chaining the other close. 

Together, mouths all open and working, taking desperate sips of each other, tortured, gorging, gutting noises, a thoughtless consuming, Midge gets back to considering spiraled snakes again, considers that one that famously feeds on its very own tail, contentedly devouring itself even as it’s dying. Oh god, she thinks, brand new—oh god, it's—they’re in love. 

The both of them.

“Dean,” someone barks, sudden, near but not here, a thundered thing with a fight built into it.

She figures it’s an end of the night scrap, initially, one boozer said this, the other that, then tottering their way outside to settle scores, but when she turns—

“Sam,” their dad says, word red with irritation, walking over to a car as black and big as his kids’ hearts and looking in, bothered but not bothered enough by its abandoned seats, standing back up to look down the curving dirt road, dirtier now, not so close that he can hear the high cry that should not be coming out of anyone’s mouth ever, not ever, but close still too many. 

The last thing she lets herself see is Sammy’s shorts coming open and Dean—she guesses—working to get right into them, breaking at the buttons, hurrying selfishly in, his low voice lower, devastated, the beestung fullness of his mouth saying brokenly, “you’re so beautiful, you’re so—oh my god, fuck, Sam,” like he’s losing his mind, like Sammy’s brother is losing his fucking mind.

Lost in his flame, his fingers really are a felony.

Unhearing of a thing else and eyeless to a life outside of their two-population limit, making skin sounds and hurt sounds and love sounds, they’re gonna get themselves dead out here tonight. 

She tells herself this wrong thing she’s about to do is the right thing, calls to mind blushful ears and sputtered speech and paying with nickels, reminds herself of a very embarrassed little laugh and the joy tucked just behind it at getting caught with slut marks, crosses her chest without believing in anyone’s God, and gets her handkerchief ready to wag.

“Yoo-hoo,” Midge says, putting a ladylike hiccup to it. 

She spins her way back to the Lucky Time Lounge entrance, hooking her elbow into daddy dearest’s, not accepting his confusion, his _wait, hang on_ —dragging him back in, oh please, oh please, my taxi’s supposed to be coming, won’tcha just wait with me, little wobble, oops—willing those two out there to finish up their emotionally charged screw, and soon, please, asking with a perfected giggle, door closing,

“Hey, you ever heard of the ouroboros? The ouroborders? The ouro—well, I can’t remember! It’s some reptile thingy. I think they have one of them at the zoo, though. Oh, I am just so sweet on little creatures.”


End file.
